We need legislation to make it a criminal offence for employers and managers to tamper with the fundamental human rights of workers to combine and force their employer to bargain collectively Kells audience told.

Steve Pryle GMB and Unite delegate to BWTUC delivered Tommy Grimes memorial lecture in Kells on Saturday 5th May 2018. See notes to editors for copy of text of the speech

Steve Pryle says in the lecture, "Doug Sanders author of Arrival City says that what will be remembered about the 21st century more than anything else, except maybe climate change, is the great and final shift of human populations out of rural agricultural life and into cities. We will end the century as a wholly urban species. The numbers involved are unprecedented and since estimates vary about population projections so by definition the numbers can only be estimated. Much of the migration from rural to urban areas will be like what has happening in China in that people move inside the country. Yet in other areas it will resemble the vast migrations from rural Europe into America.

Looking at Saunders figures - worldwide it looks likely to be 10 to 15 million per year each year for the next century. Saunders says that as the populations of Europe, America and China are not replacing themselves because of our low birth rates, some of these rural workers will be absolutely essential to maintain our health and social services and other services. We also have to face the fact that many of the jobs where there will be labour shortages will be in the lower skilled and semi- skilled areas like agriculture, transport, construction, catering and tourism. Maybe robots will be developed to do these jobs. If not low skilled and semi- skilled rural workers will be needed to fill them. The supply of rural workers from central and eastern Europe will dry up - like it has done already from the rest of rural Europe. Saunders says that Europe may face competition for the rural migrants from China and America...............The question asked by the young woman reporter from RTE about the relevance of the monument today and into the future is the key one and we have an answer of great relevance to the 21st century.Rural migration into the cities began in earnest in the second half of the 19th century. The story told by the monument is how that migration added a vital contribution to the emerging and world changing successes of our movement. The Red Flag monument specifically links the successes of our movement then and since to the contribution from this first wave of rural workers moving to the cities.We are still in the middle of an ongoing movement of rural workers to the cities which is likely to continue for the rest of this century. The Red Flag monument drawn from our documented and practical history demonstrates that labour movement links to this ongoing migration is a winning hand for the movement and for society. As the song says “it gives the hope of peace at last; the banner bright, the symbol plain, of human rights and human pain.” This very positive and very relevant lesson for one of the biggest issues we face in Ireland and worldwide today and into the future is not based on theory but on hard practical experience. Societies that want to live in harmony simply cannot afford to indulge or tolerate employer hostility. Society should not assume that the links that were built during the first wave of rural migration will happen again or that these workers will be strong enough on their own to overcome employer hostility. We need legislation to make it a criminal offence for employers and managers to tamper with the fundamental human rights of workers to combine and force their employer to bargain collectively.

As the song concludes “With heads uncovered, swear we all, to bear it onwards till we fall. Come dungeon dark or gallows grim this song shall be our parting hymn."END Contact: Steve Pryle BWTUC 07921 289880.Notes to editors: Tommy Grimes Memorial Lecture Given at the 20th Anniversary Jim Connell Society Festival in Kells May 2018It is an honour to be invited by the Jim Connell Society to give this Tommy Grimes Memorial Lecture here in the county of my birth and that of Jim Connell too.Alan Grimes, the Chair who sent the invitation said that Ann Grimes, Tommy’s wife, was pleased that I had accepted the invitation given my part with Tommy in helping to get the wonderful monument in Crossakiel done and unveiled 20 years ago in 1998.I speak as one who holds formal offices in the UK and Irish Labour Movements. I am a member of GMB, UNITE and the British Labour Party. I am a delegate to Battersea and Wandsworth Trades Unions Council which was set up in 1894 by a contemporary of Jim Connell, John Burns , in south west London. I serve on the Executive Committee on BWTUC. I am the founding Chair of the Management Committee of BWTUC Trading, the fund raising arm of BWTUC with well-known brands such as Workers Beer Company, which runs bars at festivals, Ethical Threads and our Bread and Roses pub in Clapham London. I also serve on the Irish Committee of the Workers Beer Company. In this later capacity, I am delighted to say that BWTUC accepted a recommendation from the Irish Committee to donate 10,000 euros to the abortion rights campaign to prepare for the forthcoming referendum.Until the end of February 2016, for eleven years I was the National Press Officer for GMB with nearly 640,000 members.I am well accustomed to make statements and addresses in public but always in my official capacity as speaking for these organisations policy and positions.To be asked to give this Tommy Grimes lecture is for me a departure, I am being asked to speak for myself. This means that I have to take responsibility for what I say and be ready for the vigour debate and disagreements that are necessary and essential for open and honest discussion in our movement.I want to take for my lecture a number of themes. First the words of the Red Flag itself, second the rural background of the man who wrote it, third the achievements of our own founder John Burns, fourth how history gets rewritten and people like Tommy Grimes have had to rescue part of it, fifth some words on the last 40 years at BWTUC and finally from these themes come to some conclusions from what we should learn from this long history and how that points us to the future. Of course given the breadth of this history I can only scratch the surface.Let me start with Tommy Grimes and the monument to Jim Connell in Crossakiel. What is it about? The song the Red Flag with its rousing chorus about “raising the scarlet standard high” became the anthem of the newly unionised and highly politicised manual working classes and it set out their aim of never giving up – “to bear it onwards till we fall”- on the struggle for economic and social justice. The message in the song is clear in describing a struggle that goes on without let up for generations. It is clear that the struggle involved prison – “come dungeon dark”- as per the Tolpuddle Martyrs, and the “martyred dead” like those killed at Peterloo in Manchester “whose blood dyed its ev’ry fold”. The struggle is international too with French, Germans, Russians and Americans namechecked in the second verse.It underlines the powerful employer hostility to trade unions – and those who seek “to haul the sacred emblem down “ because the man who wrote the song had practical experience of this hostility in action. But it is hopeful too “of peace at last” and “human right”.It was written by a man from rural county Meath born, not far from here, in 1852 nearly 170 years ago. Like many of the rural Irish of that time he ended up in London. I will come back to this because it has important lessons for our own days. He wrote the song in London in 1889. That year and 1888 are important. These were the watershed years in the history of the manual working classes and their long struggle for combination; that is their ability to combine into unions and force employers to bargain with them collectively.There were three breakthrough battles all in East London. First was the Match girls strike on 2nd July 1888 at Bryant and May in Bow which involved 1,400 women on strike over 14 hour days, fines and dismissal of strike leaders. The strike forced the employers to deal with the appalling working conditions that were giving rise to injury and damage to health on an appalling scale. Second, were the workers at the Beckton Gas Works which was the biggest gas works in London and the world. It supplied gas from coal for the whole of the City and the West End. They met on Sunday 31st March 1889 in the open air in Canning Town and formed themselves into the Gas and General workers union, the forerunner of today’s GMB. At the gas works they worked round the clock with two twelve shifts for six days with one day off. They put forward a single demand for three eight hours shifts with no loss of pay. They threatened strike action and the employers panicked and conceded the eight hour day. Third, in June, inspired by the gas workers, the dockers, who were then zero hours workers of their day demanded proper jobs and a pay rise of six old pennies an hour. Among their leaders was John Burns who as I said earlier set up BWTUC. This was another success.General unionism, amongst the unskilled and the semi-skilled, spread like wide fire across the UK then including Ireland. In 1891 the second largest branch of the Gas and General Workers Union was in Dublin and the second Congress of the Union was held there.The Red Flag song celebrates the victories of the Match Girls, the Gas workers and the Dockers’ in London where Connell lived and where he had himself been a dock worker.I know that the Jim Connell Society invited Rachel Holmes the biographer of Eleanor Marx to give the first Tommy Grimes lecture. Eleanor Marx with Will Thorne played a fundamental role in the Gas and General Workers union and in the spread of the new unionism across workplaces involving men and women. Eleanor at the Dublin Congress successfully moved the motion that men and women should be paid the same rates for the same jobs – something that was opposed by the older craft workers unions.The spirit of hope in the song turned out to be fully justified. The generation of leaders that led these battles and the growth of new unionism went on to form the Labour Party in 1900. The movement made steady incremental progress over the next 70 years even in the face of war and the great depression.Our John Burns in Battersea won control of the newly established council in the 1890s. The forerunner of BWTUC built homes for rent, set up a municipal electricity supply station, public baths and laundries, a foods standards body in the town hall and an electoral register. Their slogan was “Get rid of the middlemen” so they replaced contractors and directly employed the workforce.John Burns was the second ever Labour MP to be elected to the House of Commons. In 1907 as a member of the UK Cabinet he put on the statute book the law that enabled councils to build houses for rent and the Fair Wages Resolution guaranteeing workers fair pay when doing work funded by taxation whether employed directly of by a contractor. Both stood until Mrs Thatcher repealed them in the 1980s. He resigned from the cabinet in July 1914 refusing to sanction the Great War which he correctly forecast would lead to pointless killing on an industrial scale.The list of the achievements of the Labour movement, set up by these pioneers, are so numerous and have endured to the extent that they are now taken for granted – the NHS, the education system, the welfare state, democracy and the rule of law, economic and social justice. The movement outlawed discrimination, legislated for equal pay, built millions of homes for rent, nationalised the natural monopolies and created the national parks and the green belt. . As a T-shirt for an American union says “ Unions – the folk who brought you the weekend.”At BWTUC we remember John Burns with pride. That is why we celebrate the Red Flag festival and have been a supporter from the start of the Jim Connell Society. What Tommy Grimes achieved in erecting the Red Flag monument is of enormous importance and I will tell you why. I grew up in county Meath and I never heard of Jim Connell or the Red Flag and its connection to our county and that was the case for the vast majority of people. Jim Connell and the Red Flag were simply written out of history.I said I would come back to Jim Connell himself and to why like so many others from rural Ireland they ended up in England and Scotland. There were a number of different factors at play so I can only give the briefest of outline of the complex changes that led to the massive exodus of people from rural Ireland and into the cities during Jim Connell’s day.Let me spell out the extent of the movement that I am talking about. The census returns for county Meath were as follows: 1841; 183,828 people, 1851; 140,748 people, a drop of nearly a quarter of 43,480 of which it is estimated that 20,000 died during the famine. The census for 50 years later in 1901 shows the decline of a further 73,188 (52%) to a population of below 70,000. County Meath was not exceptional. Jim Connell was part of that decline of 73,188 in population. So what we are looking at first is the terrible decline in the population due to the famine between 1841 and 1851, and second the even greater decline that took place between 1851 and 1911.As you can see the terrible potato famine in the 1840s gave rise to the horrific devastation and hunger and the population fell by 43,480. But something even bigger in economic terms was occurring. The free trade movement in the UK succeeded in abolishing the Corn Laws and swept away the restriction on the import of cattle from Ireland to Britain that had been in place since Tudor times. The Irish population which was mainly rural had grown rapidly to over 8 million. The main export was pigs to England which had been fed by potatoes grown on small holdings. These mainly small tenant farmers were known as Cottiers or peasants. The change, as a result of the repeal of the Corn Laws, meant it was now more profitable for the farms to be given over to cattle and the people were cleared out. As the census shows more than 70,000 left between 1851 and 1901.In The History of Meath it says that “William Bulfin on his cycling tour of Ireland in 1902/3 described Meath as “a lovely wilderness of grass, a verdant fertile desert from which man had banished himself and into which he had sent the beast to take his place””. It was “a land given over to the bullock”. Annual live cattle exports from Ireland rose from an average of 200,000 per year in 1846/50 to over 800,000 prior to World War One. In the Kell’s area, where Jim Connell came from the population dropped from 29,382 in 1851 to 13,271 in 1911 a decline of 55%.Another factor of importance in the story is that when Jim Connell was born most of the land of Ireland was owned by 10,000 families the mainly Anglo-Irish landlords, many of which were absentees, whose only connection with Ireland was collecting the rents from the tenant farmers. The tenants had no security of tenure and rents could be increased at will. There was constant agitation for security of tenure and resistance to evictions - mainly led by the small farmers in the west. In 1870s the Gladstone Government introduced the first land act which provided for some security of tenure. So like a game of musical chairs when the music stopped the sitting tenants in possession could sit on the land owned by the freeholders. This favoured the cattle farmers who were gradually taking over the tenancies. There were a series of Land Acts - the last of which transferred the ownership to the sitting tenants.The economic historians have since gone over the land registries county by county and they have established that 20,000 native Irish families ended up with half the land of Ireland- some 10 million acres between them. For those who want to read the political consequences of this transfer of ownership of land from the 10,000 Anglo Irish families to these 20,000 native Irish families I would recommend that you read a work by Raymond Crotty, Ireland in Crisis which is out of print but the Meath County Library does have a copy. Crotty said that the result was that Ireland became a fat cat society - with more golf and race courses per mile than any other nation - and that we ended up with the green flag and the rule by the Catholic Church and after separation from the UK, the population continued to decline via emigration. You may not agree with Crotty on this. But one thing you cannot disagree with is that Jim Connell and the Red Flag was written out of history.The achievement of Tommy Grimes in reclaiming this important history - which links the decline in the rural population with the rise and successes of the Labour movement in the cities - is huge. The children in County Meath and Ireland owe a debt of gratitude to Tommy Grimes for this.I did say that I would talk about BWTUC itself over the last 40 years. In 1979 Mrs Thatcher came to power in the UK. She set about reversing many of the achievements of John Burns and his successors. As I mentioned already she repealed John Burns’ council homes for rent law and began the sale of council houses. She abolished the fair wages resolution and brought contractors and outsourcing all across the public sector on lower pay and conditions. She went after the trade unions and in particular the strong unions like the miners and Dockers. She shackled the ability of the unions legally to fight back. Her economic policy led to the migration of long standing industries like clothing and textile and footwear to countries like China and other parts of the developing world where labour costs are 10% or less of those in the UK. The jobs of nearly half the unionised workers migrated overseas and trade union membership halved. Unemployment soared to over 3 million. It was the beginning of the process we now call Globalisation. In Wandsworth all the factories along the river Thames and river Wandle closed down one by one and at the same time much of the public sector workforce was outsourced and privatised. For the trade unions in Wandsworth these changes threatened their very survival. For BWTUC itself the choice was to change or to die. I don’t have time to describe in detail how BWTUC itself came to the decision to set-up in 1985 a fundraising arm called the Workers Beer Company. We made the decision to trade to raise funds to ensure the survival of BWTUC itself and to gear up the trade union movement in Wandsworth to unionise the industries of the future and to restore trade unionism in the privatised outsourced sectors. We choose to get involved in the music industry running bars and co-promoting events. We developed the model whereby Labour Movement campaigns and bodies could volunteer people to work where their wages were donated back to their organisation. Due to the enormous hard work of countless volunteers working unpaid on the Management Committee and on the sites the organisation was a success and did generate funds for BWTUC itself and many other parts of the labour movement. There is pressure for this story to be properly documented and written up and maybe one day it will be. There is a short film on BWTUC website to mark the 30th anniversary of trading if you want to know more.I can reveal here how the links between BWTUC, GMB London Region and Tommy Grimes came about. These links were instrumental in getting the monument off the ground. Somehow in the 1990s my brother David who was a linesman in County Meath found out about the connection between Jim Connell and Kells. He told me. You have to remember that in those days there was no internet. I found out via my other brother Paddy living in Navan that Tommy Grimes was a Labour Councillor in Kells and that he had heard that Tommy was trying to get a monument off the ground for Jim Connell and the Red Flag. I was aware of the link between John Burns and Jim Connell and the Red Flag. I was also a close friend of Paul Kenny who was the GMB London Region Secretary in whose region the Gas and General Workers Union had been formed. I spoke to Paul and he suggested that we try to make contact and set up a meeting with Tommy Grimes to establish what he was proposing. We did that. The very first meeting between us was held in a hotel in Sussex near Gatwick Airport. Tommy Grimes and Michael Allen, who was the chair of the Kells Urban District Council, were on their way to Lewisham for an event to mark Jim Connell. It turned out that there were extensive links between Lewisham and Kells and that there had been a lot of discussion about a monument for Jim Connell that we were completely unaware of. Paul Kenny was on his way to Brighton for a meeting and that was where their paths crossed so that is where I set up that first meeting.At the meeting Tommy Grimes confirmed that his idea was for a monument in Kilskyre to Jim Connell. Things moved briskly. Paul Kenny said that GMB London would donate £20,000 towards a Red Flag monument linked to the memory of the gas workers and the eight hour day. I said that I would ask BWTUC to make a donation of £10,000 because of the links to John Burns. Paul Kenny said that it was essential that the form of the monument and where it was placed be solely a matter for the people on the ground in Kells. Following that meeting Tommy invited Paul and myself to travel to Ireland for the St Patrick’s Day parade in 1997 and also to meet the committee that Tommy had set up to take the monument forward. This was a very productive trip and it was then that we learnt that plans were well under way for the monument to be unveiled for May Day 1998. On reflection, I am filled with admiration for the tireless ambition and organization of Tommy Grimes who in the short time between October 1996 and April 1998 realised and built the wonderful monument that is now in Crossakiel. I think it is very fitting that tomorrow a chair dedicated to the memory of Tommy will be unveiled at the monument.The monument and the song remind us that these gains of the Labour movement did not come out of the sky. They had to be fought for and they have to be defended.The monument comes from a conscious decision to reclaim our own history and to celebrate its continuity and its achievement and to remember its leaders and everything that the old Labour Party and trade unions were able to do. You have to remember that the Labour Party by then had been replaced by New Labour and one of the things that they wanted to do was to stop singing the Red Flag at the end of the Labour Party conference each year.Paul Kenny was very clear and agreed with Tommy that the Red Flag monument was needed to set in stone the world class historic achievements of the generations of manual workers unions and the massive contribution to that history of rural workers from Ireland and elsewhere, like Jim Connell, to the liberation and emancipation of the working classes. New Labour was turning its back on this history and on the vital lessons that had been learned during the long running and enduring campaign for economic and social justice. I don’t think that we can be reminded often enough of one of the main themes in the Red Flag which is employer hostility to trade unions and second the rural background of the man who wrote it and the on-going role in human history of the move of the rural population to the cities.When we came to Crossakiel in 1998 to unveil the wonderful monument I was asked to do an interview live on the RTE radio lunchtime news on that Sunday. Obviously I was very pleased and proud of the monument and what it stood for. The young woman reporter asked me about the relevance to people in Ireland of unveiling a monument to a dead hero from a bygone age. I said then that the monument was to mark a milestone in the international campaign for economic and social justice and the huge contribution of Irish migrant workers to it. I said that in 1997 there were probably 6 billion people in the world and that out of that 6 billion - maybe 1 billion, the lucky ones, had a good deal and that the rest had a very long way to go before prosperity reached them. I said that in the words of our national poet W B Yeats, “This world ‘s more full of weeping than you can understand” and that this was still true in 1997 as it had been when Yeats wrote the words. I said that the campaign was only in its early stages and that what had been done in the UK and Ireland would have to be done across the globe and that the monument marked an important milestone in the campaign.That answer neatly summarises the position - although in retrospect I underestimated the impact of employer hostility in the UK and Ireland and the extent to which the clock would be turned backwards. The Labour and trade union movement is a living movement dealing with the problems of today and tomorrow and drawing on the experience of the past.There are two aspects in particular about the current and future situations that I would like to focus on. The first is about the growth across the world of Export Processing Zones and the second is the continuing and on-going movement of rural populations into the cities. Both impact on our everyday lives.About Export Processing Zones; these were first developed as a way of promoting economic development. One of the very first in the world was at Shannon Airport where exemption from Duty and other incentives were used to get employers to locate there. Export Processing Zones were meant to be temporary but they have become a permanent feature of the international trade system. In 1975 there were 79 Export Processing Zones in 25 countries employing 800,000 people. By 1997 there were 845 Export Processing Zones in 93 countries employing 22.5 million people. In 2002 this had grown to 3,000 Export Processing Zones in 116 countries employing 43 million people. The latest figure we have is for 2006 when there were 3,500 Export Processing Zones in 130 countries employing 66 million people. The cocktail of entitlements and legal exemptions vary from zone to zone but includes; holidays from income and sales taxes, dedicated utilities like electricity and broadband, deregulation of labour laws, prohibition of trades unions and strikes, deregulation of environmental laws, access to cheap domestic and imported labour, exemption from import and export duties. The main thing to note is that the vast majority of the manufacturing units are owned and run by multi-national corporations. If a strike breaks out in zone A in say Morocco, the employers immediate response is to lock out the striking workers and to move the contract to zone B in say Honduras until the strike is put down.The merchandise on sale across the developed world in the shops and on-line comes from the Export Processing Zones. What we are talking about here is organised employer hostility on a massive scale. When Jim Connell wrote the Red Flag he could not have envisaged the sheer scale of this institutionalised employer hostility to unions. This is something that is barely acknowledged let alone challenged. Export Processing Zones are the labour market equivalent to tax havens for the wealthy elite who don’t want to pay their taxes. Neither can be tolerated.In the Export Processing Zones labour unrest is put down mainly by way of lock out. The natural leaders of the workers, like John Burns, Will Thorne and Mary MacArthur, simply cannot emerge and economic and social development is stifled. These workers need practical support to enable them to unionise and to get collective bargaining. The low level of knowledge about this in the western world has to change.BWTUC has offered to work with a range of organisations and to fund the development of wiki technology that will enable the Export Processing Zones to be mapped so that there is transparency in the supply chain from the factory to the high street. The aim is to have an App so that consumers and others can see where clothes and goods come from. It can be used at times of labour unrest in the Export Processing Zones to shine a light on the exploitation and the putting down of new unions on the ground.Helping to liberate these 66 million plus workers is the next great challenge for the 160 million trade union members worldwide. The Export Processing Zones are capital intensive places that cannot easily move so that if the workforces are enabled to unionise - the step forward for the international campaign for economic and social justice is huge. I know that BWTUC would welcome the support of the Jim Connell Society and the Meath trade union movement to get this huge and ambitious project off the ground.The second aspect that I would like to draw attention to is that the vast majority of the 66 million in the Export Processing Zones in the 21st century are rural workers moving to the cities for work, like Jim Connell was in the 19th century.This movement from the rural areas to the cities is not something new, it is on-going and will be with us for the rest of this century. I would like to draw attention to a book by Doug Saunders called “Arrival City” that deals with this story. He has a chapter about 19th century London which covers the time that Jim Connell left county Meath that I have already touched on. The move is always related to changes in economics and to the need for workers and their families to earn a living. He tells the story of two tenant farmers called Will and Lucy Luck who were evicted from their cottage near Luton in 1874 in the final sweep of the Enclosure Acts. They ended up in the arrival city that had spread outwards from Paddington Station in London where they both found work. He goes on to say that millions of people from across Britain were following the Luck’s path to London in what was - until the late 20th century - history’s largest rural to urban migration. London was by far the largest city in the world and almost at any time in the 19th century at least 40% of its citizens were born outside the city. By 1901 the metropolis contained a starling 1.3 million rural arrivals. At least 50,000 a year arrived from rural areas in the latter half of the 19th century. So Jim Connell was one them and he was not the exception but the rule.Doug Sanders says that what will be remembered about the 21st century more than anything else, except maybe climate change, is the great and final shift of human populations out of rural agricultural life and into cities. We will end the century as a wholly urban species. The numbers involved are unprecedented and since estimates vary about population projections so by definition the numbers can only be estimated. Much of the migration from rural to urban areas will be like what has happening in China in that people move inside the country. Yet in other areas it will resemble the vast migrations from rural Europe into America. Looking at Saunders figures - worldwide it looks likely to be 10 to 15 million per year each year for the next century. Saunders says that as the populations of Europe, America and China are not replacing themselves because of our low birth rates, some of these rural workers will be absolutely essential to maintain our health and social services and other services. We also have to face the fact that many of the jobs where there will be labour shortages will be in the lower skilled and semi- skilled areas like agriculture, transport, construction, catering and tourism. Maybe robots will be developed to do these jobs. If not low skilled and semi- skilled rural workers will be needed to fill them. The supply of rural workers from central and eastern Europe will dry up - like it has done already from the rest of rural Europe. Saunders says that Europe may face competition for the rural migrants from China and America. Saunders calls for us to face up to this continuing and on-going movement and also to face the fact that it is not new and that we do have experience of dealing with it from our history.This subject is too big and too important for me to deal with it properly in this lecture. Suffice for me to say that I agree with Saunders about the ongoing movement and agree that it is not something new. Could I suggest that the Jim Connell Society plan one of the future Tommy Grimes lectures on this important topic which directly relates to Jim Connell and the Red Flag and the on-going rural to urban migration. The Red Flag monument is probably the only labour movement monument anywhere in the world dedicated to this rural to urban migration linking it to the growth and victories of our movement.In stone it says “This monument, in memory of Jim Connell, is dedicated to the millions of Irish emigrants who fought for economic and social justice and helped build the trade union movement worldwide. The song the Red Flag was inspired by the London Dock strike in 1889 and the struggle to win the 8 hour day the same year. These significant events heralded the unionisation of unskilled workers in Britain and Ireland and their liberation from unrelenting toil.”I will conclude this lecture by drawing what I see as some important lessons from the 170 years of our history.First and most important is that there is enduring support for the intergenerational campaign for economic and social justice and that it is possible with the right leadership to draw on this support to win battles and secure successful outcomes.Second it is fatal to underestimate or discount in any way the ongoing, enduring and deep rooted hostility of employers to trade unions. Jim Connell was raised in a very hierarchical and unequal society and for him the impact of the “rich man’s frown” was real and he saw the way that the unequal distribution of power did lead people to doff their caps and others – “whose minds are fixed on self and place”- to put ahead of everything else their need to climb the greasy pole. The impact of the elite has not gone away and there are powerful forces in society that seek to permanently undermine and side-line the trade union movement and to deny workers their fundamental right to combine and force collective bargaining on their employers. The gains of each generation are constantly under assault and the changing nature of industry means that the trades unions movement can easily get side-lined by these changes. My own personal view is that the institutions in the Labour movement need to attach a far higher priority than they do to the insidious effects of employer hostility.Just take the example of the cinema workers in Brixton and other parts of London employed by the multi-national Cineworld. Brave and courageous work by these cinema workers led to successful union organisation and overwhelming majorities of 300 newly unionised workers for strike action for the London Living Wage and trade union recognition. In the course of the trade dispute CineWorld sacked four of the lay leaders of the dispute. The only legal remedy open to the union faced with this injustice is taking a claim to an employment tribunal for unfair dismissal for trade union activities. This is grossly inadequate. What we have here is the internationally recognized human rights of these four workers to combine and force their employer to bargain with them collectively trampled upon with near total impunity. Understandably it has affected the dispute which is ongoing after 2 years.I am of the view that dealing with this employment hostility is the most important issue for the future of the trade union movement. The current near impunity in UK and Ireland has to end. The internationally tolerated impunity in the Export Processing Zones has to be brought to an end too. My remedy would be that it should become a criminal offence punishable by heavy fines and jail sentences for managers to trample on the human rights of workers to organize. Given that tool unions can start to rebuild unions in the private sector and new industries especially for the over 30% of the workforce in what used to be called the old manual jobs.Third we need to draw from our own history the ingredients for good leadership. The most important element in leadership is the right ideas and policies. Charisma, inspiration and empathy are necessary but not sufficient. The best guide to theory is what has worked in practice. For example my own personal view is that we can conclude from history that a Labour movement that concentrates on correcting the basic flaws in capitalism is more likely to be successful in the campaign for economic and social justice and in promoting the prosperity for its members, than a Labour movement that ignores the basic flaws like New Labour did, or those that sought instead to overthrow capitalism as per the Soviet Union. John Burns concluded that only the Labour movement could correct the basic flaws in capitalism which if not corrected lead to misery. First, capitalism cannot guarantee everybody a job so a welfare state is absolutely essential. Second capitalism left to itself tends to monopoly and gross excesses in wealth and income so only nationalisation of the natural monopolies, robust competition law and proper taxes on wealth and income are vital. Third, capitalism tends to boom and bust and this cannot be avoided. The state has to be braced to mitigate the worst impacts and to stop recessions turning into depressions and wars.I am of the view that a Labour movement dedicated to correcting the flaws of capitalism in addition to all our normal programme to deepen democracy and entrench the rule of law as well as promoting economic and social justice for everybody regardless of race, creed, colour, nationality, gender, sexual orientation or ability is the correct policy mix. I am also of the view that it will enjoy widespread support electorally. The great advantage of this programme is that its direction doesn’t change as the Labour movement seeks to form policies to deal with the contemporary challenges it faces in any age.Just as important because it is a continuous campaign it is essential that the right strategy is followed to win our aims. What this is was spelled out by General Giap who was the commander of the Vietnamese army that over a very long period defeated the French army and subsequently the US army. When he was asked what strategy he had followed he said that there is only one strategy for a long and continuous campaign and that is “all fronts at all times”. So the Labour movement has to be active in every front - be it political, industrial, social, economic, cultural, domestic and international and to give priority at different times to different fronts.Could I finally conclude by suggesting to the Jim Connell Society that it could draw on what is written on the Red Flag monument as subjects for future Tommy Grimes Memorial lectures. I think it would be good to have a lecture on all aspects of the rural migration from County Meath that took place in the second half of the 19th century that is covered in chapter 22 of the Meath History and Society. I think that Raymond Crotty’s work on the political implications of this transfer of land ownership is worthy of further study.I think that a future lecture should cover the tangled history of Britain and Ireland as covered by Norman Davies in his History of the Isles. I wish we had been taught that at school. I have already suggested a future lecture on the ongoing rural to city migration as per The Arrival City.I will finish with one last point. The question asked by the young woman reporter from RTE about the relevance of the monument today and into the future is the key one and we have an answer of great relevance to the 21st century.Rural migration into the cities began in earnest in the second half of the 19th century. The story told by the monument is how that migration added a vital contribution to the emerging and world changing successes of our movement. The Red Flag monument specifically links the successes of our movement then and since to the contribution from this first wave of rural workers moving to the cities.We are still in the middle of an ongoing movement of rural workers to the cities which is likely to continue for the rest of this century. The Red Flag monument drawn from our documented and practical history demonstrates that labour movement links to this ongoing migration is a winning hand for the movement and for society. As the song says “it gives the hope of peace at last; the banner bright, the symbol plain, of human rights and human pain.” This very positive and very relevant lesson for one of the biggest issues we face in Ireland and worldwide today and into the future is not based on theory but on hard practical experience. Societies that want to live in harmony simply cannot afford to indulge or tolerate employer hostility. Society should not assume that the links that were built during the first wave of rural migration will happen again or that these workers will be strong enough on their own to overcome employer hostility. We need legislation to make it a criminal offence for employers and managers to tamper with the fundamental human rights of workers to combine and force their employer to bargain collectively.As the song concludes “With heads uncovered, swear we all, to bear it onwards till we fall. Come dungeon dark or gallows grim this song shall be our parting hymn.